The Mighty Franks: A Memoir

“Monday I’m on the hill,” she said, meaning at our house on Greenvalley Road, where she could cook in our kitchen and eat kumquats off the tree and read in the garden under the Japanese elm in the backyard and let the vigilance drain out of those small eyes. “I’ll make tapioca.”

“Oh, yes, please,” I said. “And a sponge cake?”

“If you like.”

I nodded.

“Michaelah,” she said.

“Yes, Grandma Sylvia?”

“They’ll be impatient if you’re gone too long.”

“It’s only been a few minutes.”

She glanced at the door again. “Best to close the door when you go back out.”

The door to Huffy’s room was still closed. I found my sketch pad and stretched out on the braided rug in the living room.

As I tried to decide what to draw, my eye landed first, as it often did, on the painting that hung just above and to the right of the wing chair where Huffy preferred to sit during family gatherings. If there had been a fireplace, the painting would have hung over the mantelpiece, but there wasn’t, and this picture didn’t need that extra emphasis. It was already italicized—underlined. The painting was a portrait of my aunt, the epicenter of the room as she was of our family.

Harriet—Harriet Frank, Jr.—was her public name, her professional name. At home she was known as Hank or Hankie, therefore Auntie Hankie, or sometimes Harriatsky or, later, Tantie.

There was quite a confusion around the nomenclature of these women. Huffy had been born Edith Frances Bergman in Helena, Montana. She discarded the Edith early on because she disliked it. She went by Frances as a girl in Spokane and a young married woman in Portland. She remained Frances Goldstein—her married name—until in the mid-1930s she hosted a local radio program, which she called Frances Frank, Frankly Speaking; soon afterward she became reborn as Frances Frank, changing her last name and persuading her husband to change his and the children’s too. Several years later, in 1939, when she remade her life again, moving from Portland to Los Angeles, she appropriated her daughter’s name, a new name for a new life. She became Harriet senior, and my aunt, therefore undergoing a name change of her own, became Harriet junior.

No one thought this was strange: a mother taking her daughter’s name so that they could become a matched set.

“Harriet is an interesting name,” my grandmother declared. “Harriet is a writer’s name.”

Harriet junior became a writer—a screenwriter. No one thought this was strange either.

Or this: “Huffy and I know each other’s most intimate secrets. There’s nothing really that we don’t know about each other. Not one stitch of a thing.”

Or: “We’ve never had a cross word in our lives. Not a single one.”

Or: “Hankie and I are not merely mother and daughter. We’re best friends. We’re beyond best friends.”

They loved their pronouncements, my grandmother and my aunt, almost as much as they loved their nicknames. My uncle was Dover (his middle name bumped forward), Puddy, Corky. Another aunt was Frankie or Baby. My father was Martoon, Magoofus, Magoof.

I was Lovey or Mike.

Harriet senior was Huffy (as in: HF + y), always. Sylvia, my other grandmother, never had a nickname. Sometimes she might be shortened to Syl, but that was all. My mother, Merona, sometimes became Meron. But never anything more affectionate than that.

It was California. Blazing, sun-bleached Southern California: most any other nine-year-old boy would have spent his time outdoors playing under all that sun and sky. I spent mine lying on the braided rug, looking up at the painting of my aunt—my sun, my sky.

The portrait had been painted by a Russian cousin of my grandmother’s called Mara, who during the war had been banished to Siberia, where she was sent to a gulag and forced to paint pictures of Stalin for the government. “Your aunt and I went to Yurp together in 1964,” Huffy told me—Yurp being, like Puddy or Hankie or Magoof, a nickname, though for an entire continent instead of a person. “It was a dream of ours forever. Mara’s sister, Senta, who survived by hiding in an attic, had spent nearly twenty years trying to get her out of the Soviet Union. We found them living together in an apartment in Brussels. Every morning after breakfast your aunt and I went to their house and sat for her until dinner. We made up for a lot of lost time on that visit. And while I sat there, can you guess what I thought about?”

I shook my head.

“How grateful I was to my parents for deciding to come to America when they did. Do you know what I mean by that?”

I shook my head again.

“I mean that otherwise I might well have perished, like so many people in our family.”

My grandmother focused her dark eyes on me. “That’s what would have happened to me for no reason other than I had been born a Jew,” she said. “And if I had been murdered, that means your father would not be here, which means you would not be here.”

“Not Auntie Hankie either?” No Auntie Hankie was almost more difficult to conceive of than no me.

“No, not even our darling Hankie would be here …”

Her dark eyes shone. She was quiet for a moment. “That is very difficult to imagine, is it not?”

“It’s impossible,” I said.

My grandmother smiled enigmatically. “Yes, impossible. I quite agree.”

My aunt and my grandmother each had the other’s portrait hanging in her house. The portrait of my aunt was the larger of the two and darker, both in its palette and in the way it hinted at my aunt’s lurking black moods. How this distant cousin—a painter of Stalin—got at this in my aunt, and after knowing her for only a week, was a mystery.

Then there were her eyes. It was the kind of thing people made jokes about in portraits, but my aunt’s eyes truly did seem to follow me wherever I went. This may have had to do with the fact that her eyes weren’t merely in the painting but reflected in several other places in the room at the same time: in the reverse paintings on mirrored glass of Chinese ladies that hung over the bookshelves and, more prominently, on the wall opposite the portrait, where there was a mirror, very old, as in seventeenth-century old, Flemish, with a thick Old Master frame made out of alternating strips of ebonized and gilded wood. Its dim spotted glass showed my aunt back to herself, so that when I came between the painting and the mirror, I felt my aunt was looking at me from two directions, or else that I was interrupting a secret conversation, self unto self unto self, into infinity.

The mirror also made it possible for my grandmother, from her customary place in the wing chair, to look across the room at the mirror image of the painting of her daughter, who was therefore never out of her sight.

I decided that for my drawing I would try to capture the mirror capturing the picture of my aunt. Clever! I started with the frame, and then I moved toward the shape of Auntie Hankie’s head. It wasn’t easy to get right; not easy at all.

After half an hour the door swung open, and in an explosion of sound and shifting currents of air my aunt came barreling toward the kitchen like a fighter stepping into the ring. She busied herself there for several minutes, then just as the smell of toasting bread began to reach the living room, she poked her head in to check on me. With a rapid glance at my sketchbook she said, “But, Lovey, is doodling the absolute best use of your time when right over your shoulder a whole library is just waiting for you to explore?”

I looked down at my drawing. A doodle? I felt my cheeks burn with shame for being such a failure. How was I ever going to be an artist if I couldn’t draw one of the subjects I knew best in the world? I quietly folded the drawing in two and closed my sketch pad.

My aunt approached the bookshelves and bent down. She ran her fingers along the spines of novels by Dickens … then Thackeray … then Trollope. She stopped at How Green Was My Valley. “This was an absolute favorite of mine when I was a girl,” she said, before moving on to two other books, which she lifted down from the shelf and handed to me. “Take my word for it, Lovey, between Of Human Bondage and Sons and Lovers you’ll learn everything you need to know about what it feels like to be a certain kind of young person. Your kind, if I may say.”

I let the books fall open in my lap and peered dubiously at the river of dense print. My aunt said, “But you have a sharp mind, Mike, do you not? Of course you do. It’s time to get started, quick-quick, on reading grown-up novels …”

When I didn’t say anything, she added, “You don’t want to be average, do you? To fit in? Fitting in is death. Remember that. You want to stand apart from your peers. Always.”

Thanks to my aunt—my aunt and uncle—I was as far from fitting in with my peers as it was possible for a nine-year-old to be. I didn’t even know what fitting in felt like. And I was proud of that. Ridiculously proud, at times.

Nearly as sacrosanct as Morning Time were my aunt and grandmother’s Saturday antiquing excursions. These were mental health days, but they also had a clear purpose, since a static room is a dead room, and living in a dead room wreaks havoc on the spirit (—Harriet junior).

Senior and junior both approached shopping, this kind of shopping, with a connoisseurial rigor. Setting off with them on a Saturday was similar, I imagined, to what it must have felt like to travel with them to Yurp, which was in a way what these excursions of theirs were like, mini voyages across time, history, and culture, to distant worlds—worlds reconstituted by the past as contained in things.

Only they weren’t merely looking for a pair of candlesticks or a charger or another piece of Chinese lacquer; they were also training “the boy” in what was authentic or a repro, g. or n.g., period or—heaven forbid—mo-derne, a word whose second syllable was drawn out and pronounced with an exaggerated sneer.

I found these Saturdays to be alternately thrilling and unnerving. Heaven help me if I picked up something, even merely to investigate, and heard that piercing sotto voce n.g.—for “not good.” It was the equivalent of being told that I was n.g., or that I was an idiot. Of course I was an idiot. What could a kid know about Lewey Schmooey (as he, or it?, was described in a lighter spirit); how could he tell vermeil from ormolu, Palladio from Piranesi? It was as hard (almost as hard) as being read a paragraph of Dickens and another of Austen and being asked to say which was which. A boy who wanted to remain in this school (this family) made it a point to learn. The names and dates, the facts and figures, the periods, the styles (in prose, the voices; in movies, the look). The techniques: dovetailing over mitering, chamfering and pegging, feather-versus sponge-painting … before long it would be showing versus telling, the active versus the passive voice, plain transparent Tolstoyan prose versus Faulknerian flourishes versus Proustian discursions …

My aunt had several places she liked to noodle around—in Pasadena and out along Main Street in Venice and, when she was feeling particularly ambitious (or flush), in Montecito or down near San Juan Capistrano, where some of the more top drawer dealers did business. Today we were staying local, though—our destination was a cluster of shops way down on Sunset Boulevard near Western Avenue.

In the first shop we came to I picked up a lacquer tray that had two Chinese figures on it. This looked like it would fit into my grandmother’s apartment, and so it felt like a safe choice. No sooner had I reached for it than my aunt’s hand shot out. “No, not that, Mike. It’s repro. N.g.”

It was all in the tone, an icy dismissal that made an already small me feel like an even smaller me. And yet I kept trying, I kept yearning to be one of them, to know what they knew, to see what, and how, they saw; to win, and keep, their approval, their acceptance, their love.

Again and again my aunt’s head shook dismissively. Again and again I would try.

“That’s better. There you go.”

And again.

“Better still.”

But why? The why always came from my grandmother. Why is this good, why do we care? “Discernment is about judgment. It’s about knowledge. This is a good desk because it has good lines. Because no one has put garbage on it to make it look new, or fake. Because it makes you imagine.”

“Imagine what?”

We were standing in front of a tall piece of furniture. A secretary. I knew that much at least. It had a drop front, behind which there were many secret compartments. Some of them with tiny keyholes so that they could be locked.

“The man—no, the woman—who sat here, and wrote letters. Secret letters. Or in her diary. Imagine writing it two hundred years ago.” My grandmother opened one of the compartments. “And keeping it here.”

“And this ink stain,” said my aunt, joining in. “It’s from when she was disturbed at her work.”

“Disturbed?” I asked, confused.

“By her husband,” said my aunt. “Think of the painting by Vermeer. The woman writing a letter? It’s in your book. She looks up with a start, just like in the painting. She knocks over the bottle. The ink, just a few drops, sinks into the wood as a human fate is being decided, and quickly …”

My aunt and my grandmother exchanged one of those glances—I knew them well—that suggested they had sidestepped into their own private communication, the equivalent of a compartment in the desk I did not have access to.

“She doesn’t want him to know what she’s writing,” said my grandmother. “She has to choose between protecting her diary and protecting the table. She chooses the diary, of course. Because of her secret life. Do you understand?”

I nodded, because that was what was expected. But I had no idea what they were talking about. None at all.

Better had turned out to be a pencil box; even though it was Victorian (which like mo-derne usually received a crisp, definitive n.g.), it had two figures painted on its lid—in the Chinese manner, of course—and was useful what’s more. “You can keep the tools of your trade in it,” my aunt said jovially. “We can do away with that ordinary little pouch of yours. What do you think, Lovey? Would you allow me to make you a present of it?”

The suspensefully anticipated question. It came along at one point, sometimes at several points, on each antiquing excursion.

“Oh, yes, Auntie Hankie.”

“And what about these bookends?” she said, taking down from a shelf two bronze bookends in the shape of small Greek temples. “They would help organize your library at home.”

“They’re beautiful, Auntie Hankie.”

“We don’t mind if there’s a small scratch on one of them, do we?”

I shook my head. “It’s a sign of age,” I said.

“A sign of age!” said my grandmother, delighted. “The boy truly is a quick study.”

A very special treat after one of these Saturdays was being invited to spend the night on Ogden Drive. The invitation would emit from the wing chair, which was hard not to think of as my grandmother’s throne. (Sylvia’s chair, which stood across from it, was smaller, its seat closer to the ground.) If my mother had not been alerted ahead of time and had not prepared a suitable bag, there would be a flurry of discussion: What will the boy sleep in? (“His underpants?”—the very word, spoken by my grandmothers, caused my cheeks to leap into flame.) How will he wash his teeth? (With toothpaste spread on a cloth wrapped around an index finger.) What will he read? (The big Doré edition of the English Bible? Surely not yet the leather-bound Balzac that had belonged to Huffy’s mother, Rosa …) Who would return me to the canyon was never a concern, since everyone knew the answer to that: aunt would drive nephew back up the hill following Morning Time the next day.

The invitation came soon after we had returned from our antiquing excursion that afternoon, when Huffy realized that Sylvia was out for the evening, at one of her concerts downtown. “We’ll keep each other company tonight,” she said to me. Auntie Hankie made sure that there was enough food in the house for dinner and then headed home.

After she left, Huffy said, “How about if we just have two large bowls of ice cream and then get into bed and read?”

“Is there chocolate sauce?”

She laughed. “There can be.”

When we finished our “dinner,” Huffy said, “I have something for you. I bought it for you last week.”

She went into her room and then returned with a small package in a brown paper bag. Inside there was a blank book bound in orange leather. Its paper was ruled, and it closed with a tiny brass lock and key. On the cover, embossed in gold, was a single word: Diary.

“I keep one,” she said. “I have since I was a young woman in Portland. When you’re older you’ll read it. You and your brothers. You’ll be able to know me in a way that you cannot possibly now.” She looked at me. “That doesn’t make much sense to you, does it?”

I shook my head.

“You’re old enough to begin writing about your own life.”

“Write?” I asked, confused. “What kinds of things?”

“You can write about the world you’ve been born into. It’s always interesting, no matter when you are born into it. And you can put down a record of who you are to yourself.”

Who. You. Are. To. Yourself. These words meant nothing to me.

“And what the people around you are like.”

This I understood better. Or was beginning to understand better.

Grandma Huffy often gave me guidance like this. They weren’t rules exactly; they were more like principles to live by, sized down and age-appropriate—most of the time.

During the long, tedious, full-out Haggadah Seder at our cousins’ house in the deep Valley, for instance, after every few prayers she would whisper, “Spirituality has nothing to do with this excruciating tedium, remember that.”

If we were in a shop and she picked up an object and saw the words Made in Germany stamped on the bottom, she would set it down with a decisive thud and declare, “Never as long as I live—or you do either.”

“You must always be a Democrat,” she said to me one day. “In this family that is what we are.”

In this case there was no explanation—only the edict.

She told me stories too, some of which I could not stop replaying over and over in my head, like the one about the painting or Aunt Baby.

We were driving in her blue Oldsmobile one afternoon when I had asked her where Aunt Baby got her nickname. “It’s very simple. She’s the baby of the family.”

“But she’s not your baby”—even I grasped that much already.

“No, she’s not. But that doesn’t make any difference to me. To me she is another of my children. Would you like to hear how she came to live with us?”

I nodded.

“Her mother died when she was a small girl. Her father was a friend of your grandfather Sam’s from Portland,” she began, saying the name of her dead husband, my grandfather, for the first and, I believe, only time in the whole ten years I knew her. (There were no photographs of him standing on the top of her dresser, no sign of his existence anywhere at all in The Apartment.) “He was a decent man, but he was an alcoholic. An alcoholic is someone who cannot stop himself from drinking, and when he drinks is not, shall we say, at his most worthy. A father who drinks like that is not a good father. He cannot be. It is not possible. I saw this, and it disturbed me. Deeply. So one summer I invited Baby to come stay with us. She was thirteen, and she had a wonderful time. Your aunt was like a sister to her, your father a brother.”

She paused. “At the end of the summer I took her for a walk. Just the two of us alone. And I said to her, ‘Baby, I would like to make you an offer. But I want you to know first that my feelings will not be hurt if you say no to me. Do you understand?’ And she let me know she understood that, which was important. Then I said, ‘I would like to invite you to come live with us here in Los Angeles. To make your home with us for good. I want you to think it over, and let me know when you have.’”

“And what did she say?”

“She said she did not need to think it over for even one minute. She wanted to stay with us forever. Which, until she was married, she did.”

Looking through the windshield, she said, “It’s important to be able to decide matters for yourself sometimes. Even when you are still a child.”

She saw that as the point of the story. I saw something else: a child entrusted to parents who were not her own, as I was so often entrusted to my uncle and my aunt.

Precisely an hour after we climbed into our beds with our books, my grandmother announced that it was time for us to sleep. She turned off her light, and I obediently turned off mine. Then she arranged her pillows, centering herself between the bedposts with the leaping flames, and within minutes was definitively, snufflingly, out. I, instead, took what felt like hours to find a way to put myself to sleep. Everything in The Apartment was just so humming and unfamiliar and alive, from the bursts of traffic up on Hollywood Boulevard to the sound of Sylvia, who had returned from her concert, puttering busily (once Huffy’s light went off, she began walking from room to room), to the rumblings that originated from deep in my grandmother’s chest and didn’t seem able to decide whether they should come out through her mouth or nose. Every now and then there would be a raspy explosion, half snore and half shout, that would send me flying down under the blankets; I came up again afterward even more awake, with nothing to keep me company other than the wallpaper, whose embossed wreaths and urns I traced with my finger over and over and over. When that didn’t help I returned to Doré’s terrifying renditions of Adam, Moses, Jonah, et al., which were even more alarming when examined, squinting, in the dark of the night, or else I studied the bust of Madame de Sévigné that stood up on an onyx column and had been chosen, my aunt said, because she adored her daughter and wrote some of the most memorable letters in all of literature. In front of the bust a small, armless rocking chair moved back and forth on its own, very slightly, as if it were being rocked by a ghost.

And then suddenly, somehow, it was morning, a day awash with eyeball-stinging Southern California sunlight, and Sylvia was bringing me a glass of hand-squeezed orange juice strained of its pulp, which, wasting nothing, she herself ate with a teaspoon. “Drink, Michaelah,” she said. “Good health is built on vitamin C. Every day a dose.”

Huffy was already up and dressed, a rarity and something that happened only on the days I slept over, since normally she waited in bed, reading, until my aunt came for Morning Time.

After I finished the orange juice, Sylvia asked if I’d like to help make the bed. “I can show you how to miter the corners the way they do in a hospital,” she said.

A bed with hospital corners? It sounded exciting, a nifty trick, something to be good at. I loved tricks and I loved learning. I got up eagerly.

First we angled the mattress frame slightly away from the wall. Then we pulled up the crisp white sheet and the blanket. She lifted up the mattress, folded one sandwich of sheet and blanket underneath, held it there firmly, then reached around for the other flap.

“It’s like wrapping a package,” I said.

“Yes, exactly,” she said with a smile.

Suddenly from the doorway a sharp voice: “But whatever are you doing?”

Sylvia stiffened. “Teaching him how to make a bed with hospital corners,” she explained.